Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques

I previously posted why social media analysis tools are important at Take Me To Your Leader,  and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end ..  I will post a nice comparisson later this week.

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.

Start by setting up a folder for the brand you want to monitor, this of course could be yourself.

Next create 7 folders: Must Reads, Blogs, Comments, Message Boards, Social Bookmarkting, Microblogging, and General …

Folder 1 - Must Reads: this folder contains services that I feel pick up a good overview of where your name is being mentioned on the web. This is the one folder that I know if I only have a couple of minutes to spend looking that I have to hit. For this I use Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts.

Folder 2 - Blogs: consist of most user generated content that doesn’t get picked up as news or alert. Use Google Blog Search, Blog Pulse and Technorati

Folder 3 - Comments: pick up comments and opinions of all those users who don’t write full blogs. use Backtype.

Folder 4 - Message Boards: interesting topics here; Board Reader does a good job at following conversations where people often forget to look.

Folder 5 - Social Bookmarking: follow services such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.

Folder 6 - Microblogging: I used to have twitter search and a few other things in here but I have really been impressed by the Twingly microblog search… or of course, use any of the tools from my Twitter Tools post.

Folder 7 - General: So thus far I’ve been just teasing, I like all those tools but 9 out of 10 times I don’t set any of them up … The quick solution is to use some mass social media search engine such as Serph, Keotag, and my favorite, Social Mention.

I have all this set up and it allowed me to find every tweet, every blog post, every comment about my panel at SXSW the same day they were posted. So try it for yourself, you’ll see how addicting is to find everything that everyone says about you or your brand …

Keep reading take me to your leader for more social media related news.